Reminder to switch browsers if you haven’t already!


  • Google Chrome is starting to phase out older, more capable ad blocking extensions in favor of the more limited Manifest V3 system.
  • The Manifest V3 system has been criticized by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for restricting the capabilities of web extensions.
  • Google has made concessions to Manifest V3, but limitations on content filtering remain a source of skepticism and concern.
    • @fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de
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      66 months ago

      Pretty great outcome for firefox really.

      I don’t think firefox numbers will get a huge & immediate bump, but I think that over time it will support a reputation for firefox as being cool different and just plain better.

      I can’t imagine raw-dogging the internet without an ad blocker in 2024. I’m aware that most people aren’t bothered by ads, but surely… surely some people might be interested in blocking them if they become aware that it’s possible and easy.

  • @asteriskeverything@lemmy.world
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    1086 months ago

    I’m sorry. I’ve seen this so many times today and I can’t stand it anymore.

    I hate this article photo. What the fuck is that shit?? Gloveless fingers? Digit warmer? Turtlefinger sweater?

    • @graymess@lemmy.world
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      496 months ago

      How long until the majority of the Internet is inaccessible to non-Chromium browsers because the pages “don’t support them”?

      • @webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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        6 months ago

        Honestly the way the internet is going do you need access to the majority of the internet? I feel like its pretty dead as it is now already.

        Lemmy will still work because we mostly use Firefox, and i bet the same will hold true for many others.

        Basically the moment mainstream internet becomes google only you will see nerds build new websites specifiably to cater to the non google crowd and i trust random internet nerds a hack of a lot more than a monopoly corporation.

        BRING IT ON GOOGLE!, YOU CAN INITIATE THE PUSH TO CREATE A NEW BETTER INTERNET. ^Create demand for freedom trough your suppressive enforments^

      • @RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        I don’t think that’s going to be the case. People will find workarounds. The whole point of these alternative browsers is to use the web in whatever way the developers think their user base wants to use it. If the web is inaccessible to non-chromium browsers then people will spoof their browser to the site to look like a chromium browser.

      • Balder
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        116 months ago

        Then I guess people will use the web less and less.

      • @sunbeam60@lemmy.one
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        56 months ago

        This is getting more common. Whatever dev accepted that when sizing the story should hang their head in shame. “No, you don’t size for a poor solution, you size for a good solution and let the PMs chip at the things they understand, keeping some things sacrosanct”.

  • @tvbusy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    756 months ago

    I use Firefox everywhere which means I have ads blocking everywhere, including and especially on Android. All my tabs are synced and are easily transferred between devices.

    • @GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
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      56 months ago

      While I dont use Firefox itself any more I am using librewolf on my PC, which sadly doesnt exist for phones yet. Also, GOS comes with its own privacy oriented chromium fork called vanadium, so I’m using that in the mean time.

      • AWildMimicAppears
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        76 months ago

        I also use librewolf and have settled for iceraven on my phone. the list of installable extensions is much longer (even if not everything is working yet, depending on how far mozilla has come along) and it has about:config support, which gives me a pretty close approximation of my desktop browser.

      • @Nelots@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        I’ve found the Mull browser (which can be found through the DivestOS repository on F-Droid) works great as a privacy-focused firefox fork, similar to LibreWolf. I hear Fennic F-Droid is also a pretty good but less extreme alternative, but I’d imagine you don’t care much about that if you use LibreWolf.

    • @Scrollone@feddit.it
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      -136 months ago

      If we want to be honest, Firefox on Android has way worse performance than Chrome.

      (But I still use it instead of Chrome)

        • @Macros@feddit.de
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          116 months ago

          I use it on a Pixel 5 and even there it is fluid while browsing. Only on Youtube there is the slightest stutter for HD Videos. Heavy sites like Discourse fora or Cryptpad or such work flawlessly.

        • @sheogorath@lemmy.world
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          16 months ago

          I use both on a Galaxy Fold 5 and can confirm Chromium based browsers are smoother. Although I still use Waterfox on my phone. I just keep a Chromium based browsers in case a website doesn’t work when I visited it using Waterfox.

      • @tvbusy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        116 months ago

        It depends I think. I found Chrome to be a tiny bit faster but then ads bogged the page down so most of the time, Firefox is faster for me.

        In some very rare cases when I need to disable ads blocking, Chrome is indeed faster but I’d rather abandon websites rather than disable ads blocking.

        So if you love ads, Chrome is better. If you hate ads like I do, Firefox is miles ahead.

        • JWBananas
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          26 months ago

          There are other ways to block ads. Adguard does a great job on Android. It establishes a local VPN, so it can do HTTP[S] content filtering in addition to DNS blocking.

          • @ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            36 months ago

            Can’t use my VPN and adguard at the same time iirc, unless android has two active VPN “slots” now. Can’t bring a pihole with me 24/7 either as much as I would like to.

                • @Cyberpunk3000@lemm.ee
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                  16 months ago

                  Yes because there is no need to setup another VPN. You only configure the DNS settings (Private DNS). I know that Mullvad on PC has an option to use custom DNS server

      • @foggenbooty@lemmy.world
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        26 months ago

        Ive been using Firefox on Android for years but it really needs some TLC. It doesn’t support scaling to a tablet/desktop UI at all so it doesn’t work well in DeX or anything larger than a phone. I also recently had to swap to Brave because I noticed Firefox was draining a lot of battery all of a sudden. There’s some kind of leak or running process that isn’t sleeping properly. In a few months I’ll re-install and try again.

  • @Phegan@lemmy.world
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    616 months ago

    Firefox is a good option.

    But I will raise people one more. Waterfox. Been using it for over a year now and enjoy it.

  • @resetbypeer@lemmy.world
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    516 months ago

    Well I will sound like an old bore but throughout the nearly 20 years Firefox is out I never looked at anything else. Seen the rise and fall of Internet Explorer seeing the rise and fall of chrome.

    Even Firefox in its dreadfully slow era (2010-2016) it did not made me change. And let me be clear Firefox is far from perfect. But for my use cases (privacy and security balance over certain conveniences) I would not change for any commercially backed Browser.

    Moral of the story. It’s better to donate to Mozilla and enjoy the freedom of your browser than giving yourself in on the erratic behavior of the big tech companies.

  • @majestictechie@lemmy.fosshost.com
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    496 months ago

    The silver lining here is that you’d hope that more people will simply adopt Firefox. It’s user share has been too low for too long given how great it is

    • @llama@midwest.social
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      286 months ago

      They messed up 10 years ago when for some reason it took ages for Firefox to load compared to Chrome, and sadly it never really recovered the user base even though the performance is vastly improved.

      • @ruse8145@lemmy.sdf.org
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        46 months ago

        To be fair, even in 2006 the Mozilla corporation was never going to outspend Firefox

        Especially not given how much Mozilla wastes on executive compensation ;)

    • @KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      146 months ago

      Their user share was pretty okay for a while, but bombed when Chrome first released because it was much more performant. Unfortunately, that stigma never quite fell off and they lost a huge opportunity to overtake the market.

      • @InternetPerson@lemmings.world
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        6 months ago

        How was it more performant? As I remember it, Chrome was loading websites not noticeably faster than Firefox, as website loading speed depended and still depends mainly on your internet connection and hardware anyway.

        As I remember it, Chrome exploded because it was pushed onto users at every possible opportunity while Firefox depended (and still depends) on users actively looking for it.

        Used Google or Google products? Get ads for Chrome. Wanted to download Google Earth? You had to activly uncheck a box such that Chrome wasn’t going to be installed as well. Meanwhile no ads and not the same amount of exposure for Firefox.

        That way they achieved a critical mass and snowballing did the rest. There were so many users using it that it was considered a good choice just because it was used by many people.

        Regarding the performance aspect, if there even was a noticeable difference, it was worse than Firefox. Where else did the “Chrome eating RAM” memes come from?

        • @ruse8145@lemmy.sdf.org
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          136 months ago

          I think you are misremembering. Chrome won at the start because it was fast as fuck and Firefox was not. Firefox caught back up in the 2016 time frame iirc and they’ve been back and forth ever since.

          Ironically chrome was named so as a goal was to reduce the chrome of the UI and focus on the web content, something recent versions of chrome and Firefox have abandoned in favor of massive swaths of whitespace and giant chrome buttons (on Firefox you can enable “unsupported” compact mode to reclaim some of the space if you’re on a laptop)

          • thermal_shock
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            26 months ago

            agreed. chrome was bare ones and super fast when it was released. over the last two years it’s a fucking monster memory hog

          • @InternetPerson@lemmings.world
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            26 months ago

            I’ve been a loyal Firefox user for almost as long as Firefox has existed. So I’m probably a bit biased. However, when I used other browsers, and if it wes just to try them out, I didn’t notice any benefits in terms of loading websites and executing their scripts. This includes Chrome. In benchmarks there are obviously differences visible, but to me as a user they didn’t matter. I wasn’t so short on time that I needed those microseconds. So I really don’t get how performance could be an argument in this.

        • @KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          116 months ago

          I was a Firefox user at the time, using adblockers, and the swap was a huge improvement to my browsing experience. I can’t even remember all the ways, since this was a decade ago. But at the time, Firefox was in a lul.

          Things likely swapped pretty fast, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time because I was already using Chrome.

          No ads swayed me, no Google specific sites, it wasn’t side loaded with anything.

          The Chrome eating ram memes came much later, after the enshitification process reached the third step. You seem to be compressing the entirety of both browsers into a single moment, and that’s not really how time works.

          • @InternetPerson@lemmings.world
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            26 months ago

            I understand that you made such an experience, but I can’t share it though. I’ve been a Firefox user for almost as long as Firefox exists, which is almost two decades. (I think I joined somewhere between 2005-2007). I’ve tried other browsers, sometimes I had to. However, I didn’t notice any benefits compared to Firefox. Especially not in performance. Even though benchmarks have always shown clear differences, they weren’t significant enough for me to consider switching, as the difference really didn’t impact my browsing experience.

            Regarding the memes: That was just a random annectode which I found suitable here. I don’t claim it has been that way since the beginning. (Can’t relate to that anyway.) But given that it has been around for a while, I don’t see how performance can be an argument in favour of Chrome in this.

        • @Kiosade@lemmy.ca
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          36 months ago

          I just remember Firefox around that time and for like over a decade just felt bloated and super slow in comparison. No idea if it’s better these days or what.

          • @InternetPerson@lemmings.world
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            26 months ago

            I’d say give it a try and see for yourself.

            I can just recommend using Firefox for a multitude of reasons. However, I am biased as I have been using firefox for almost two decades and did not have many reasons to complain.

          • @ruse8145@lemmy.sdf.org
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            16 months ago

            Its much better, and indistinguishable from a usage standpoint against chrome (I use Google garbage at work and they deliberately hamstring it in Firefox, so I use both browsers side by side)

            Biggest Firefox win is containers and privacy. Chrome probably has better absolute security (based purely on the concept that non-private security is Google’s whole schtick, not based on data) and in the last year it’s gotten better memory management (via sleeping tabs) that Firefox just hasn’t caught up with…but there’s an addon for that ;)

          • @planish@sh.itjust.works
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            16 months ago

            I remember it as, Firefox was fast enough, but Chrome was shipping a weirdly quick JS engine and trying to convince people to put more stuff into JS because on Chrome that would be feasible. Nowdays if you go out without your turbo-JIT hand-optimized JS engine everyone laughs at you and it’s Chrome’s fault.

    • @buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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      66 months ago

      I think you’re ignoring the functional aspect of the integration of Chrome into the Android platform. A lot of people’s entire online life is stored within the walls of the Chrome ecosystem. And moving all of that to a completely different browser that is not fully integrated with Android is daunting to say the least.

    • @hogmomma@lemmy.world
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      26 months ago

      For work, I use Chrome, but only because Firefox’s profile management is (more or less) nonexistent. Once they have that, which I understand isn’t too far out, I’m ditching Chrome entirely.

    • @VerPoilu@sopuli.xyz
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      16 months ago

      Unfortunately, I think that while ad blockers won’t work as well, they will still work good enough that most won’t bother making the switch.

      https://blog.getadblock.com/how-adblock-is-getting-ready-for-manifest-v3-6cf21a7884f6

      https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/

      https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-mv3.html

      https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1067als/comment/j3h00xj/

      The main issue I see is the slow update of filters (which require an extension update). This might make YouTube win the cat and mouse game. Where YouTube updates(ed?) their blocking detection multiple time a day.

  • @Zink@programming.dev
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    456 months ago

    Fortunately I at least have Firefox on Linux. But then when I need to use Windows for something… well look at that, also Firefox!

    • @Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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      466 months ago

      It’s still DNS level only, right? That wouldn’t stop YouTube ads, or remove annoyances.

    • @tal@lemmy.today
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      166 months ago

      You can block ads from being served to you.

      But the flip side is that the website developer can make a website that won’t function if it can’t load the ads being served.

      And most users are gonna want a functional website.

      • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️
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        66 months ago

        Somebody’s going to need to write a web site with a very, very compelling function to make me give enough of a shit to not just click away if it is deliberately coded to not work with Firefox/adblockers. Like, gives me a million dollars per page load functionality.

        • @HarriPotero@lemmy.world
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          66 months ago

          The day they do their own DoH in-browser it is definitely up to them. It’s already opt-in if you want to see how well your pi-hole won’t work with it enabled.

          Next step is to do DoH by default, and finally making it compulsory.

          • Album
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            6 months ago

            They can do it all they want but it won’t work…

            If I “opt in” it falls back to non doh immediately because using doh on my network is not up to Chrome.

            use-application-dns.net + nxdomain for any known doh provider

            I don’t use pihole but doh blocking works great on my network. It should work on a pihole tho it’s pretty basic stuff.

            If you can’t resolve the domain you can’t validate the TLS certificate.

  • @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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    376 months ago

    Switched to Firefox at work today. Looks like I still need Chrome to do the VPN handshake, but the more of us there are, the more pressure we have on IT!

      • Veraxus
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        136 months ago

        Is that project going to maintain Manifest V2 support?

        • Ephera
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          6 months ago

          I don’t have official information, but I doubt it. They tend to stick as closely to the Chromium experience as possible, with the exception of the ungoogled part, of course. Maintaining Manifest V2 support would also just be a massive amount of work, for which they likely don’t have the manpower.

        • @AnActOfCreation@programming.devOP
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          6 months ago

          I have no idea. I’d guess not, as it’s not a strong fork like other Chromium-based browsers. Its main selling point is that it’s nearly identical to Chrome, but with a lot of the Google garbage stripped out. I don’t use it as a daily driver, but only when I need something Chromium-based like the use case mentioned by @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml. It’s very likely to work wherever Chrome does.

    • Emptiness
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      46 months ago

      I’m still confounded by workplaces that run the old nineties way of VPN handshake by browser. Clunky, clumsy just straight up bad digital workplace setup.

      There is no reason to not do it the modern way where all the handshaking and connecting is done under the hood, hidden from the user. At the most you as a user should only see the tiny little systray icon switch how it looks.

  • @egeres@lemmy.world
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    366 months ago

    It’s weird that I’ve been on firefox for the vast majority of my life and I always had this perception that “everyone” was using it. Here in lemmy you hear about it all the time, my friends use it, I see it on my newsfeeds etc

    But when you check the market share it around 2.8% while chrome is 65.1% https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share